The first things a homeowner should check in the spring in order to keep the basement dry are the gutters and downspouts. You want to be sure that the gutters are clean and that the gutters and downspouts are not ripped away from the house after all the ice we had this winter. This is what keeps the water flowing away from the house. You also want to check the soil around the foundation. You...

A few weeks ago, before the snow was really melting, and there had been no rain, an insurance company in the town of Hudson, MA called us because there was water in the basement. That didn't make much sense, so the first thing we had to do was find out where the water was coming from. There were no signs outside, so we went downstairs and found a finished basement with finished walls against the...

We got a call about a week ago from a gentleman who had a handyman come and try to repair a leaking tie-rod. A tie-rod is a little metal rod that goes through the concrete that holds together the pieces of wood that creates the forms for the foundation as it is poured. After the foundation is poured, those tie rods are broken in order to remove the wood, but the metal tie rods stay...

Radon is a radioactive gas that cannot be smelled, seen or tasted. Many times this gas can enter a home through tiny cracks between the floor and the wall in a basement. These tiny cracks can also allow water in the home. Unlike the nuisance of water in the basement, radon is dangerous to your family’s health. In fact, untreated, radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States according to...

Just like with any electrical equipment, bad things can happen. With sump pumps, there have been quite a few fires. These sump pumps have motors which generate heat, and pedestal sump pumps come up high. This heat can generate fires when something touches them. People store belongings, such as artificial Christmas trees in boxes. These motors, when running, vibrate or people can hit them by mistake. They can causes fires when the motor comes in...

There are two components of a bulkhead.The door itself, which faces the outside, and what that door sits on, which is usually the concrete steps that go down to your basement. You can do a very low-tech test to see if you bulkhead doors are leaking. Get a garden hose and send someone inside to stand under your bulkhead. Run water on the door and the sides of the door and see if you can...

We got a call the other day from one of the premier real-estate investment companies who had water coming in from under one of their finished walls in the basement. We instructed them to remove the sheet rock so they could see the block foundation and where the water was coming from. They called back and said that it was leaking from between the blocks that make up the foundation and that it was also...

This past week we received a call from a premier real estate investment company that has a basement leak behind their finished basement walls in their corporate offices. I suggested that they open the wall so we could see what part of the granite block wall was leaking. They opened the wall and saw water seeping and squirting from the blocks. The investment company decided that they would try to stop the leaks themselves. Within...

Right now, our most common call regarding water in the basement is people who are finding water at the bottom of their bulkhead steps in the basement. Water is coming in from the snow melt right now. With the snow melting, the water is often coming in from the top of the bulkhead door where it meets the concrete. The way you can see that is to simply feel the wall or seam at the...

We have been running into the problem of water leaks under finished walls quite a bit lately. In an apartment building in Waltham, we had this situation in a "garden level apartment". This is an apartment that is mostly below grade. It was freezing out and they said the water was coming from below the finished wall. This didn't make too much sense. When we got there, the only way we could see what was...